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radmonger posted:I wonder if you used a lower power version over a city-sized region you would have a thing that could power phones. they’ve already made prototype phones that charge with panels in the screen of a cell phone so
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Oct 1, 2021 20:21
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silence_kit posted:Oh yeah, it is an old idea. It was probably a more attractive idea back when it was expensive to produce solar panels. People were really more into ideas like this and engineering solar concentrators back then. If you point a solar cell at a more concentrated resource, you don't need to manufacture as many to get the same power output. Is there substantial difference between manufacturing a solar cell for space as opposed to one for Earth? I recall that they were more expensive because you wanted to maximise longevity and efficiency due to the cost of shifting weight to orbit, so precious metals were a more prominent component. I would think that placing consumer grade solar cells in space would result in a much shorter lifespan due to solar radiation that isn't present on the surface of the Earth and usually doesn't play well with semiconductors.
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Oct 2, 2021 02:22
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is there substantial difference between manufacturing a solar cell for space as opposed to one for Earth? I recall that they were more expensive because you wanted to maximise longevity and efficiency due to the cost of shifting weight to orbit, so precious metals were a more prominent component. Yeah, you are right, the great reduction in solar cell production cost in recent history is for the relatively lower efficiency mono-crystalline and poly-crystalline silicon single-junction cells used on earth and not the multi-junction III-V semi-conductor space cells. I suspect that the main reason why III-V semiconductor products are relatively expensive isn't the raw material cost of indium, gallium, etc., but is because the III-V semiconductor industry is a boutique industry serving customers who are willing to spend a lot of money on their products. I don't have a lot of insight on the radiation hardness of different types of solar cells.
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Oct 2, 2021 11:27
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Apparently the wind is finally going to blow enough tonight that we'll have some of that FREE WIND POWER.
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Oct 2, 2021 13:32
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silence_kit posted:I suspect that the main reason why III-V semiconductor products are relatively expensive isn't the raw material cost of indium, gallium, etc., but is because the III-V semiconductor industry is a boutique industry serving customers who are willing to spend a lot of money on their products. I've manufactured cells from scratch that are in orbit right now. The material cost really is awful when you consider that each candidate wafer is just that - a candidate. There is an enormous amount of validation that goes in to quite literally dozens of requirements that results in the grand majority of wafers getting rejected. Multiply the cost of terrestrial cells by large integer factors for increased labor, material cost, substantially MASSIVELY increased equipment quality, MORE equipment for parallelism because you're trying to bin the cells, tons of testing with even MORE expensive equipment plus all the time it takes to put a cell through thirty tests, financing and accounting rate....
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Oct 2, 2021 14:08
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Potato Salad posted:I've manufactured cells from scratch that are in orbit right now. The material cost really is awful when you consider that each candidate wafer is just that - a candidate. There is an enormous amount of validation that goes in to quite literally dozens of requirements that results in the grand majority of wafers getting rejected. Multiply the cost of terrestrial cells by large integer factors for increased labor, material cost, substantially MASSIVELY increased equipment quality, MORE equipment for parallelism because you're trying to bin the cells, tons of testing with even MORE expensive equipment plus all the time it takes to put a cell through thirty tests, financing and accounting rate.... when you talk about cells that fail this candidacy process, what happens to them? are they entirely chucked out, or is there potential for reuse in less difficult scenarios, i.e., terrestrial power generation
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Oct 2, 2021 15:06
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Potato Salad posted:I've manufactured cells from scratch that are in orbit right now. The material cost really is awful when you consider that each candidate wafer is just that - a candidate. There is an enormous amount of validation that goes in to quite literally dozens of requirements that results in the grand majority of wafers getting rejected. Multiply the cost of terrestrial cells by large integer factors for increased labor, material cost, substantially MASSIVELY increased equipment quality, MORE equipment for parallelism because you're trying to bin the cells, tons of testing with even MORE expensive equipment plus all the time it takes to put a cell through thirty tests, financing and accounting rate.... I have not personally priced a multi-junction III-V solar cell and have compared it to a normal cell, but was under the impression that and am willing to believe you that they are many x the cost. I suspect though that a lot of the reasons for the cost increases aren't fundamental and are largely due to the III-V semiconductor industry being a much smaller and a much more boutique industry than silicon. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Oct 4, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 15:36
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Things are looking to get spicy this winter in terms of electricity prices. Just saw this article: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/global-natgas-price-surge-looms-united-states-this-winter-2021-10-04/ TLDR: benchmark futures are still $6 for Louisiana hub in January, but California is $13/mmBTU and New England is over $20/mmBTU. And with natural gas accounting for between a third to half the generation now, expect some fun times ahead. I can believe it, as watching the LMPs today on MISO and PJMs site, they were in the $60s to $70s all day long. Not sure what the weather was like in the rest of the country, but the weather in Chicago was super mild, nothing to write home about. 2 years ago, the price would have been $25/MW all day long.
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Oct 5, 2021 04:03
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The expensive gas may be just what we need for the Natural Gas industry to shoot itself in the foot https://twitter.com/BloombergNRG/status/1445078532678422536?s=20
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Oct 5, 2021 14:07
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Who Could Have Guessed That Gas Fuckery Would gently caress Gas
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Oct 5, 2021 14:22
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I think that the more that can be done to associate anti-nuclear sentiment with the fossil fuel industry and climate-denialism, the better.
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Oct 5, 2021 14:26
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CommieGIR posted:The expensive gas may be just what we need for the Natural Gas industry to shoot itself in the foot
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Oct 5, 2021 15:00
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Grouchio posted:The German gas scare only lasted a few months. How embarassing.  Not really? Storage is lower than ever, and prices are spiking almost every month now.
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Oct 5, 2021 15:13
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How much of the cost of running a natural gas plant is the fuel cost?
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Oct 5, 2021 15:16
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silence_kit posted:How much of the cost of running a natural gas plant is the fuel cost? Lemme find the data, but the fuel cost is actually like double the cost of the plant, versus nuclear where the fuel cost is a drop in the bucket. Largely because you pay for natural gas by the cubic meter and its continuously being used versus a nuclear plant where you pay for the fuel and use that same fuel for 2-3 years at a time. Most of the actual cost of a nuclear plant is building it and maintenance, the operation costs are pretty small.
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Oct 5, 2021 15:18
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CommieGIR posted:
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Oct 5, 2021 15:19
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Grouchio posted:(I was talking about the "OH gently caress THE GERMANS ARE FORCING GAS ON MITTELEUROPA OVER RENEWABLES" scare) The article seems pretty explicit that the reason the UK and France are pushing for nuclear is because Germany is importing so much gas from Russia.
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Oct 5, 2021 15:46
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silence_kit posted:How much of the cost of running a natural gas plant is the fuel cost?
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Oct 5, 2021 21:16
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silence_kit posted:How much of the cost of running a natural gas plant is the fuel cost? It's a complicated question (that I don't have the answer to), due to many factors. If we assume the marginal cost of running the plant is only fuel (i.e. the fixed costs of building etc are already paid), this still depends on the per MJ or cubic metre (foot?) price of natural gas. It is unlikely that a heavy user such as a power plant would pay the spot price of gas, they would likely have locked in contractual prices on gas futures. Then of course the fixed costs as a proportion of running a plant vary on how often you run a plant for. A peaker that runs for say 100 hours a year would see the fixed costs as an extremely high proportion of overall costs. If that plant ran for 4 hours a day, fixed costs would be a fraction of total costs. Then throw in complicating factors such as maintenance, other consumables such as lubricants, staff changes between idle and running etc. Fun fact: it dawned on planners here in Oz that relying on natural gas plants for a black start scenario (entire grid outage) may not be a great idea as the gas pipelines require electricity to stay pressurized. e: another lucrative revenue source for gas peakers is filling system reliability contracts. Being paid to have the ability to rapidly spin up to support frequency/voltage etc without having to actually generate. Large scale battery storage such as the Tesla install in South Australia has cannibalized this somewhat. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 23:52
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Ever since Frank Rich left the NYT, Friedman is unquestionably the dumbest person at that paper. 
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Oct 7, 2021 01:46
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Phanatic posted:Ever since Frank Rich left the NYT, Friedman is unquestionably the dumbest person at that paper. https://twitter.com/screaminbutcalm/status/1105577845642878976
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Oct 8, 2021 16:08
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Yeah, France is gonna have a lot of smug going on for a while: https://twitter.com/Astiburg/status/1446828896033378304?s=20
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Oct 10, 2021 03:21
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I didn’t realize there were transmission lines across the channel. I guess it totally makes sense since theres also a train across the channel, but still.
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Oct 10, 2021 14:27
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There's also a line from Norway to the UK as well.
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Oct 10, 2021 14:36
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UAE's second reactor is now live on the grid https://twitter.com/thjr19/status/1447416293850812419?t=9ghtUz62awM4sK7by2EvWg&s=19
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Oct 11, 2021 05:25
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Considering the shoddy OSHA standards of Dubai they better hope that nuclear plant doesn't chernobyl
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Oct 11, 2021 11:48
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Be ready for a million replies to your post explaining that it is theoretically impossible for a nuclear plant to malfunction, every instance in history where a nuclear plant had an accident was an anomaly, etc. etc. Nuclear plants are very safe, etc. etc. Plant cost has been driven up by pointless safety measures etc. etc.
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Oct 11, 2021 11:55
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Lol someone's bitter
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Oct 11, 2021 12:21
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Nuke plants can't fail except when external factors like markets and politics directly influence the design. No Problemo.
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Oct 11, 2021 13:20
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Grouchio posted:Considering the shoddy OSHA standards of Dubai they better hope that nuclear plant doesn't chernobyl I think they put them in concrete boxes these days so Chernobyl doesn't happen again but I'm no nuke engineer
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Oct 11, 2021 13:24
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lol at the anti nuke sentiment let’s spin up some more ng plants to handle demand woo green energy
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Oct 11, 2021 13:36
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Grouchio posted:Considering the shoddy OSHA standards of Dubai they better hope that nuclear plant doesn't chernobyl It's a PWR, comparing it to an RBMK is pretty tasteless. Also that's a terrible trope.
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Oct 11, 2021 13:39
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Nuclear energy cannot fail. It can only be failed. All of the drawbacks to the technology are external to the technology and can be blamed on The Greenpeace Conspiracy and malicious actors inside of government nuclear regulatory agencies. edit: Also, world governments are colossally stupid for not rapidly building out nuclear power plants and consist of brain dead morons. At the same time, countries all over the world need to start programs immediately nationalizing the world's nuclear power plants and building more of them. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) silence_kit fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 13:49
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To get away from the threadshitting tier level of trolling: The reactors are APR-1400s, US Licensed reactor designed built by a South Korean company KEPCO.
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Oct 11, 2021 13:57
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To be honest, threadshitting & trolling is about all some people got left.
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Oct 11, 2021 14:23
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CommieGIR posted:UAE's second reactor is now live on the grid It's nice to get a bit of good energy news for once. Their first reactor went online last year, and began commercial operation this year. Sounds like the UAE is planning to use nuclear to supplement large solar installations in order to transition to 50% green power by 2050. Hopefully they'll be able to do that sooner, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. In particular their energy sector is relatively inefficient, so they're planning to focus on systemic upgrades to reduce consumption. His Divine Shadow posted:To be honest, threadshitting & trolling is about all some people got left. Yeah the Drill, Baby, Drill folks seem pretty obsolete at this point. Kaal fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 14:25
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Finland's 1,6GW new nuke plant was postponed (yet again) to spring 2022. The construction began in 2009. It was supposed to start production this autumn, but I guess they noticed they forgot to turn their turbines around resulting in banana-shaped turbine axles or something. A pity since an extra 1,6GW would have helped in current situation.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:44
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Ihmemies posted:Finland's 1,6GW new nuke plant was postponed (yet again) to spring 2022. The construction began in 2009. It was supposed to start production this autumn, but I guess they noticed they forgot to turn their turbines around resulting in banana-shaped turbine axles or something. lmao Olkiluoto is a masterclass on how to fail project management and institutional knowledge retention
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Oct 11, 2021 16:43
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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suck my woke dick posted:lmao Is it as bad as building your wind turbines in a reindeer grazing ground and then being surprised that people graze their reindeer there?
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Oct 11, 2021 16:48
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Total Meatlove posted:Is it as bad as building your wind turbines in a reindeer grazing ground and then being surprised that people graze their reindeer there? Or even better: Drops in wind availability due to decreasing wind as the gulf stream changes https://www.ft.com/content/d53b5843-dbe0-4724-8adf-75c66127ea80 Its not permanent, but its going to be a problem for the next few years at least. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 17:51
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